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SB 1070: Making Democrats Put Their Money Where Their Mouths Are …

The PUSH Act

One of the more annoying features of American politics is the fact that the Left is hardly ever made to put their money where their mouths are, to put up or shut the **** up. So they feel free to adopt moral poses that they never have to back up with meaningful action because they almost never get confronted on it.

Take SB 1070, the Arizona anti-illegal immigration (not anti-immigrant) law. All over the country, Democrats have been condemning the state of Arizona and its fed-up legislature in the harshest and most vociferous tones. Not satisfied with repeatedly likening the state and its citizens to Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, they stood to cheer and applaud the leader of the very nation at the forefront of the problem as he attacked their fellow Americans forced to deal with the consequences of his nation’s government’s decades of failure in providing a better environment for his people to pursue their dreams and prosper in their own nation.

The fact that none of them, from the President on down, have apparently deigned to read even one line of the legislation in question has not stopped them or their media allies in spreading all manner of malicious falsehoods about the law and demanding that others act as if their patently bad-faith allegations are true. One would not know that immigrants have been required by Federal law to carry identification on their persons at all times in the United States – like almost every other nation on Earth, including Mexico – for more than half a century.

Nonetheless, despite unrelentingly biased and negative coverage, denunciations from the entirety of the Democrat Party (barring AZ Democrats in tough districts) upwards of 60% of the American people continue to support the bill. But that doesn’t mean that Arizona is not feeling the pinch from the torrent of name calling and slander. Many other organizations and corporations – professional sports included – are being pressured by the usual suspects to cancel any engagements, functions and events in Arizona. Cancelled conventions and retreats are taking an economic toll on the many towns and cities and their businesses that rely on tourism and visitors from out of state to stay afloat.

More risible is the fact that several Democrat Mayors across America have announced with great fanfare official boycotts against the state of Arizona, each having not read the bill and yet claiming the same incendiary falsehoods as true.

So far, Governor Jan Brewer is engaging in some much needed push-back (like I had hoped she would instead of the usual Republican tactic of duck, cower and hope it goes away), trying to inform the American people of the actual facts of the bill, the facts surrounding it and exposing the cynical bad faith of the legislation’s critics. Of course, this will not have any effect on the law’s attackers – the truth of the bill was never a concern, just the opportunity to preen for the cameras and pose on the cheap.

Which is the problem – the Democrats need to be made to back it up.

Some have had to already, however mostly more as a function of geography than anything else. The prospect of San Diego businesses losing the patronage of their many visitors from across the state border has seen a rapid tamping down of the rhetoric from city’s previously self-righteously shrieking and chest-beating liberal public officials. But it is AZ Utilities Commissioner Gary Pierce’s letter to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa asking if the city’s Arizona boycott included Arizona’s electricity that was a stroke of genius and presents another way forward.

A more active, less geographically limiting solution is needed – one that would hit Boston thousands of miles away in Massachusetts just as directly San Diego and Los Angeles in the neighboring state to the west. I call it the PUSH Act (i.e. Put Up or SHut up). Arizona state legislators should announce a bill and the Governor should announce her willingness to sign it as soon as it reaches her desk, that the state of Arizona would sponsor the transportation of any persons found to be not legally in the United States in the state of Arizona to any sanctuary city or city boycotting the state of Arizona of their choice. This would include everything from providing tickets to renting busses, rail cars and/or air transportation and it would be totally justified because the costs would be far less than allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the state drawing on state resources that the state can not afford.

Furthermore, the Governor’s office should let it be known that in implementation, priority for transportation to the desired cities would be given to convicts and individuals otherwise in police custody.

In other words, Put Up or SHut up.

I kinda doubt that the Antonio Villaraigosa, Mike Bloomberg, Gavin Newsom, Michael Coleman or Tom Menino would be rolling out the red carpet as convoy after convoy of busses chock full of illegal immigrants arrive at their cities and head straight to disembark them at City Hall or, better yet, the city’s welfare office. Considering their budget woes, crime issues and the quite widely held, politically troublesome (for them) belief (even in deep Blue cities) within the electorate that the nation’s immigration laws should actually be enforced, it’s a certainty that they would not be quite so happy to bear the burden they have been screaming and denouncing the state of Arizona and its taxpayers for refusing to carry on its shoulders.

The way I see it, the Mayors can either throw their city gates wide open and take the political consequences, not to mention the hit on their budget numbers or stand athwart the city gates and look like hypocrites.